- FSB has made several crypto-related arrests since 2023.
- Suspect faces life in prison if convicted.
- Russia-supporting groups have also raised funds with crypto.
Russia’s Federal Security Service, also known as the FSB, appears to have resumed its crackdown on citizens it suspects of sending crypto to the Ukrainian military.
The FSB has announced the “arrest and detention” of an unnamed male resident of the Tula Oblast on treason-related charges, Interfax reported.
“We have established that a Russian citizen used cryptocurrency to transfer funds to an armed group fighting on the Ukrainian side,” an FSB spokesperson said. “The maximum sentence for treason of this sort is life imprisonment.”
The arrest indicates that the FSB has resumed a crackdown that has already seen several citizens from across the country sent to maximum security penal colonies after sending crypto to pro-Kyiv forces.
FSB monitors crypto transactions
The agency has charged the Tula resident, aged 32, with violating Article 275 of the Russian Criminal Code.
This article states that all forms of financial support to the Armed Forces of Ukraine or any other pro-Ukrainian militia group are a form of “high treason.”
The FSB is believed to be monitoring a range of cryptocurrency donation channels using blockchain analysis tools developed in 2023 by Rosfinmonitoring, the Russian anti-money laundering agency.
The intelligence agency has also stepped up its monitoring of various war-related Telegram chat rooms.
Many of these chat groups seem to be affiliated with supposedly pro-Kyiv Russian militants fighting on the side of Ukraine. And many of these chat groups provide crypto wallet details for members who want to send crypto donations.
FSB’s return to the warpath
The FSB began making crypto donation-related arrests in the second half of 2023, and intensified those efforts in 2024.
But in early 2025, the number of arrests dropped. Instead, the FSB appeared to focus on prosecutions.
In March, a court sent a man from the Oryol Oblast, around 370 kilometres south of Moscow, to jail for using crypto to “transfer money” to the Armed Forces of Ukraine on “multiple occasions.”
Recent weeks appear to suggest that the FSB is back on the warpath, however.
In addition to the Tula arrest, FSB officials recently arrested a man on suspicion of taking a Bitcoin payment worth $100 to send information about a military unit near his home from a “representative of the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense.”
A court in Tyumen found that between January and February 2024, the defendant “collected and transmitted information about the unit,” Vechernyaya Moskva reported.
The court sentenced the man to 15 years in a maximum-security colony and reprimanded him for “potentially endangering the lives of 200 Russian soldiers.”
Crypto has been used as a fundraising tool on both sides of the conflict since the outbreak of war in February 2022.
In 2023, the blockchain security provider CertiK said that pro-Russian neo-Nazis Telegram campaigners had managed to raise $5 million worth of crypto donations.
Tim Alper is a news correspondent at DL News. Got a tip? Email at tdalper@dlnews.com.
